Paradise
by holospartoi258 - Alpha 01
Summary: Epilogue to 'Love'. The Real World can be such a pain... but for Blu, is Paradise any different? Freedom is relative.
1. Ethereal

_****_Please read this warning: _****__I do not own Rio, Jewel, or any character or theme used in the Rio film. They belong solely to Blue Sky Films and 20__th__ Century Fox._

_HEY ALL! xD I'm so sorry I left you guys… I really had to study for exams (which is everything over here in Singapore) so I had to dump FFN somewhere :S Haha. Sorry._

_Anyways, I decided to make this new two-shot, set straight after Love? I know you're waiting for NtY to be updated but um… I have no inspiration for it. I completely ran out (the ending of Chapter 12 was supposed to be more dramatic than comedic) of stuff for it… so in order to let my thinking juices out (no TWSS joke intended) I had to write this. Yeah; I've been listening to too much Coldplay as well._

_So here you go. Epilogue to Love? I know a lot of you weren't happy with the ending… so I decided to do this._

_P.S. Yes, up to today, my mother will not allow me to buy Rio on DVD. So here I am, still confused over the specifics, though I doubt I will need to utilise any over in this story. Maybe._

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><p>Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and there was no longer any sea. I saw the Holy City, the New Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride beautifully dressed for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, "Look! God's dwelling place is now among the people, and he will dwell with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God. <strong>He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away." ~Revelations 21:1-4<strong>

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><p>Humans have religion to save them. They often say that Heaven is a place so paradisiacal and blows your mind with the awe and wonder that can be contained by infinity. That's why Christians evangelise and believe in God and Jesus- because it would ultimately end up in this place called Heaven, where everlasting life without earthly troubles and joy –not temporal happiness, but eternal contentment- reigns. And everybody wants to be in a place where no sorrow, death, pain, suffering, tears, mourning or hate exists. Everything is perfect.<p>

Of course, birds aren't humans. Did you ever look at your deceased parakeet and wonder where in the world it would go? Birds don't believe in God. Or Allah or Buddha or any divine entity. Heck, some humans _treat_ us like religious symbols. But we don't ascend to Heaven or Hell or any place like that. It might seem predictable or cliché or call-it-what-you-want, but we roam the earth. After all, we were animals – we are not human whose lives are controlled by themselves and themselves only. For animals, we go wherever nature and humans take us, thus it is only fitting that we are chained here forever. A 3.26464 million pound burden that pulls you to itself at a 10ms^-2 acceleration- you would die near instantly if you try to escape, and thus your only option is to drag your feet across the ground and live with it.

This is my experience of dying- I see a mere wire cuboid, pulled to the earth from a height of merely 10 metres to produce a force of (assuming that a cage is 2kg) 20N, the weight of a kindergartener, crashing onto my head. It is only a flash, a nanosecond image that is quickly erased by darkness. This must be what an executed victim must have felt like- one moment you feel the rope around your neck and your heart beating like a jackhammer, and suddenly, nothing. Just like a computer shut down- gone with the wind.

One must also consider, however, that the spirit and soul of this living entity still prevails on. I am no ghost or paranormal being when I pass from life to death but rather I am reborn. I can catch a glimpse from the feathers from my wing, anyway, but all I can really envision is when I regain consciousness, I see Jewel's body, right next to mine. I am completely relieved to see that Jewel, the one I had been trying to save and preserve her life, the one I felt destined to be with and love with all my heart, was alive – her chest rose and fell, the tide of the ocean. Of course, I couldn't say the same for my carcass. I am physically dead. I used to question this statement as one could not really say it without lying their noses off, but I can say for a fact that I am dead. Gone from this world, the only remnant being my earthly body, an artefact that would decompose overtime as the sands of time blew over and erased it completely from the memory of anybody in the world.

However, the body that is utilised to represent me as an individual in this new world remains the same. The feathers from my wing and the slit stuck to my mouth that is my beak is in field of vision. I cannot use the water surface as a mirror, since I am not in the real world anymore, but I know I am only Tyler Blu Gunderson, having died from saving the love of my life from death, passed into this new world that is neither Heaven or Hell. Birds roam in the very same geographical, astronomical place they came from –the real world- but this is not the same one. It was Paradise, where you had not a single care to drag you down and you could do whatever you wanted.

But honestly, if Paradise was just an ethereal form of Earth, what difference is there?

I looked at Jewel. Her face was that of an angel, divinely beautiful and peaceful in her slumber. She was motionless, but when she woke up, she would be normal once again. She'd be found by some stranger, it would be all over news, and she would fly in this world with new-found freedom- the real world would suddenly be her Paradise. Of course I would be able to see her and follow her and memorise every single word she utters, but she would wander through this world with full knowledge that I was dead.

To be honest, I would not know which emotion would dominate Jewel- would it be elation and relief that the one that loved her so much it hurt had vanished from this world, that any anguish laden on her dissipated, just like that, and she would be able to live to see another day? Or would it be sorrow and fury that her best friend –and the only one of her species-, the one that she platonically loved and promised her that he would always be there to care and protect her, now was gone from this world forever? The mind of Jewel, I figured, was like Greek Scriptures- it's out there for everybody to see and attempt to decipher, but no matter how long you were with her, you could never know her true thoughts or emotions.

This was also the reason; I figured too, that we were never actually meant to be together.

How would Jewel react, I wondered, when she woke up and realised that I was dead. Not that it was some freak show spectacle, but her reaction… I wouldn't know what she would do or how she would do it. My carcass will never come back to life and jump to its talons, the crown of Fe^3+ reddish-brown and the concept of death completely disregarded. Of course, the real world was scientific- once your heart stops pounding and your breathing rate decelerates to a complete stop, you are eliminated from there, forever. Jewel, like me, would not come to terms with such ludicrousness and injustice and have her heart stamped on. Something of which I should be experiencing – after all, I've become used to it.

Alternatively, she would be indifferent – the death of the one you know is always tragic, and this neutralises the fact that I was gone, a burden chained to her talon and a rock laden on her heart now removed. She would be able to roam this world as the last of her kind –unique, and no artificial, forced attraction towards my unsophisticated self to 'save the species'- and fly, tasting the wind in her beak as she streamlined through the air gracefully and magnificently, shearing through everything that came past her. The sky, of course, isn't really matter. The only matter in there is the tiny air particles invisible to bird eye that slide over you like teardrops – you are merely soaring through empty space, freedom found in something so easy, yet something so difficult for ignoramuses... such as myself.

I looked upon Jewel's face. I could see her, touch her (her feathers are still as silky smooth, polka-dotted with silicon dioxide) and smell her (she smelt like the jungle, the aromas various species of flowers emitted with a hint of citrus) – she was alive. To be honest, initially I had thought she would be captured by Nigel, that cocky cock of a cockatoo, since she didn't have the strength to fight him off… but I figured that was a rare moment where fate stepped into the real world and allowed an innocent life to live. That was astounding; and I have whoever it was to thank for it.

But the fact is, I was dead, and she was alive. She would roam this world without me, alone, solitary (the connotation attached here is deliberately vague) but I would know wherever she was, almost as if I were stalking her. It was almost creepy, in that sense, when something follows you for the rest of your life, an omnipresent spirit, watching every single action of her until she breathed her last breath. I mean, where else could I have gone? Going to Linda and Tulio would do me no good –it would only tear me apart even more, another entity with sentimental burden to shred my soul even more than it already was, and she couldn't even see me- and the rest of the world would not even find me. Not even Rafael, who was too busy with a family to take care of, a mate he could depend on and simultaneously protect, a complete entity having survived the tide of the real world.

But for me, I was dead, and it was all because of a stupid cage. And now Jewel would never be able to see me even though I would be right next to her, telling her that I loved her countless times despite the fact that she won't hear it, period.

And when she opened her gorgeous ocean blue eyes she would not see me standing over her, the tears now welling in my eyes for having seen full Jewel's face. Normally, it would make my then-heart race and make me hyperventilate if I had the then-lung capacity to do so, to see it and remind me why I could live another day and be with the love of my life even if she did not reciprocate my feelings. Of course, I couldn't live another day. And it would be unlikely that Jewel ever does love me, now that, you know, I was dead.

She saw only the sky, a bunch of empty space with particles you couldn't see anyway.

She blinked a few times, before she surveyed her surroundings. My body was out of her field of vision, as she surveyed the horizon of the beach. It was a marvellous sight –though it paled in comparison to the bird looking at it- the water glistened so much like glass that you thought you could ice-skate on it, the sand grains beneath the two of us massaging any surface that made contact with it. The sun had begun to peer over the surface, its rays of hope shining on the optimistic and pessimistic whether they wanted it or not. You could do anything on beaches, I supposed, ranging from a family picnic to wild sex to hiding a murder, since the vast sheet of sand and the gigantic sheet of water could supply anything that provided pleasure to you… except for true love, of course.

That was when the inevitable occurred- the ravishing sight of the setting dissipated and immediately, her eyes scanned for another living-being on the beach, who had sacrificed himself for her, who loved her so much he wouldn't mind dying twice if it meant she lived, who had been told that she won't fear as long as she was with him.

How she was going to survive in this harsh world now, however, is beyond me.

"Blu, wake up," Jewel whispers while rocking my body, her voice as sweet as honey, her warm and gleeful smile shattering my heart- she looked as if she were expecting my eyes to open and tell her that we're going to be alright, that I have her and she has me, that nothing will go wrong as long as one of us was not out of the equation. I wanted to shake her and tell her I was right here in spirit, not physically alive but still present. But I wanted to say I was asleep too, and that this was not real but rather a fantasy, a trick of the mind where I would truly open my eyes where it would meet Jewel's for her to see me. The way Jewel acted was if she really wanted me alive –which might be a hint to the fact that this _is_ all just a dream- and all the more the sorrow gnawed at the edges of my soul, as if it were a paper ignited to flames, flames that were fuelled by the first teardrop that slithered down my face. Even in Paradise tears existed; Revelations were blatant lines.

"Blu," she said, a decibel louder and rocking my carcass with a fraction of a Newton more. All it needed was just a hair's-breadth of a unit of force for the body to lose its momentum on the pivot of in-contact-silicon-dioxide, rolling over for my body to come alive-face-to-dead-face with her, not a response generated from my body and the iron-infused blood on my head like a crown of thorns.

The real world crashes on us.

"Blu!" Jewel suddenly yells, her honey-imbued voice now impure. "BLU!" She shrilled, and her wings futilely grab my body's shoulders, as if her divine touch could resurrect my pathetic carcass, and shakes it like a maraca. Maracas were tools used by people to make music- only when shaken could they be utilised to their full extent. You could not say the same for carcasses, as they are dead. Their spirit is now gone, and it is merely a piece of flesh and bones (in fact, they are regardless of life) on the shore, left to rot and return to the environment where some lucky plant uses it for nutrients. But no matter how they are shaken, the sands of time will never reverse- they stay stagnant in their velocity to move forward. And as of any point of time where after the wire cage had crashed on me, I will not come back to life. I will be dead forever.

How in the world could I come to terms with this, let alone Jewel?

My vision is cloudy, but I can see Jewel's face of fury and indignation. "Don't play games with me, Blu," she seethed, trying to pretend herself and me that the entity that represents me is physically alive and merely attempting to fool the love of his life, the one he could always be honest to and slash or never trick her into the unthinkable notion in the intention of leisure.

"You told me you love me, remember? Wake up… don't joke… wake up… WAKE UP!" The last two words snapped me out of whatever trance I was in, but it failed to hamper to twin streams of liquid sourcing from my eyes, hot moisture that irritated my corneas and made my nose runny. What kind of Paradise is this, that the real world can still backstab you and overstuff you with earthly emotions and experiences? What kind of Freedom Kingdom is this, where you can't look at the love of your life mourning over your carcass without bursting into tears? This must be Hell, where all the animals are disposed off, only the torture was subtle –like cyanide- and there were no flames. Only a beach that completely misled you and having subject to seeing your love weep at the loss of you. Of course I could leave and decide not to completely disregard Jewel to save myself the pain of loss… but we're chained-together birds, period. How could I leave her?

"No… you must live, Blu," she pleaded over my lifeless carcass wistfully, as if mere verbal commands could perform the miracle of imbuing a spirit back in his one-pound body. "You must live, Blu. You must live. You mustn't die." I can already see tears veiling her sapphire irises, a mourning gown instantaneously donned, but for me they were already spilling like blood poured out for all. I _should_ have expected her to weep and mourn so hurtfully until her heart bled (after all, what kind of sane bird would _not_ cry over someone you liked… platonically)… such that I would know what to do, how to react, how to keep Jewel from having her heart broken. I wouldn't be here sobbing and wishing this hadn't occurred in the first place, and that Jewel and I would be together in this place called Paradise and live in a metaphorical sense, happy forever after.

But of course, that would've been the ONLY way out. Either way I'd still be dead- Jewel would still be depressed and wailing over me… and/or herself. And either way it would be all my fault.

By the time Jewel smashed her voice in an attempt to revive me (_"YOU MUST LIVE! BLU!")_ she completely lost it, breaking down into tears and joining me as I mourned over the chasm that I had created between us- the real world and Paradise. Part of my sane, unemotional self told me that she was alive and I should feel relieved and overjoyed that she gets to enjoy her life without me. But then my illogical, hopeless romantic of me screamed into my ears, with as much audible intensity as Jewel had ten seconds ago- why didn't you take her along with you? Now she would be eternally separated from you, lonely and solitary and having part of her soul ripped from her body- she would never be able to see you again, look into your eyes, feel your breath against her feathers or even love you.

Freedom was relative – you could be here, in the 'comfort' of the knowledge that your love was alive and well, and you could literally do as your heart pleases to do. But when you're soaring through empty space without any companion, a hollow opening in your heart where someone used to occupy, then how could you be free? The biggest burden that ever existed in this world was not people, but the grief that the person brings about, be it intentional or not.

And the above hypothesis is based on the flimsy assumption that Jewel truly cared and… and loved me. She didn't even tell me that she loved me or hinted any attraction towards me… except that one time ("I won't fear. Not when you're with me."). I claim to know her… yet I don't even know what was best for her. I save her life and here is she, in a crumpled state and weeping over a jerk's body- a jerk who could not grasp the fundamental concepts of love.

"Why? Why? _WHY? _Why did you have to _leave_ me?" she continued to screech, even though we both knew that if I was alive right now (and even then, my spirit has not been eradicated from this geographical location) I would not be able to answer such a question. Why did I leave her? My hasty, romanticist side of me told me I left her because I wanted to give her a new life, a restart button that allowed her to move on with no 'save-the-species' motif, no burden of canon love, no me.

But then, I had left her in the real world, when she could have been with me in Paradise, in this new place where joy actually exists and mourning is absent. Of course, there were blatant lies. Stupid, stupid, stupid lies that the world laid upon us.

I looked upon her, face buried in the feathers of my carcass and garlanding them with tears and small whimpering voices irritating the stillness of the dawn. Did she really view me with such immense sentimental value? Did she now see me as a lamb, sacrificed for her non-existent sins? Did she truly see me as part of the equation, part of who she was meant to be? Fuck romantic love, I could have remained the best friend who did not let his emotions get the upper hand and tended to her every need, wiping away her tears and providing a shoulder to cry on when she was sad and giving her whatever she needed, twenty four seven and aiming to please her.

I went to my carcass – only to realise that I could literally put myself through it, like a ghost going through walls, but rather the only object I could faze through. And so I laid myself down, still in a constant war with my tear glands, and I felt Jewel's warm tears spill all over me, her face a surface of warmth and sorrow and her feathers ruffling against my body. Being in my carcass did not make it alive, but rather I could feel every sensation that was upon it – a parasitic relationship between ethereal and real. Then she looked upon me, where her eyes locked into my carcass's closed eyelids but her gorgeous twin cerulean gemstones locked with mine. They were veiled with misery of loss, but still sparkled beautifully nevertheless.

"I love you, Blu," she whispered, words that made my non-existent heart burst forth into fireworks and sent shudders down my non-existent spine. It meant the world to me that she loved me now and my mission had succeeded in a Pyrrhic victory, and that she reciprocated my feelings and we would be together forever, and that my fantasies had come true… but of course, the chasm that separated us, Jewel in the real world and me in this so-called 'Paradise', just negated everything. Nothing can come true.

And then the most unexpected thing happened- she reached down and pressed her beak against my carcass's, or rather mine. Her breath tasted like wild berry in the jungle, where she had lived her whole life until she met me, and her beak moved slowly but rhythmically, like a chorus of a death song. I found myself closing my eyes and savouring probably the only chance this would ever happen, moving my beak and synchronising with hers, though I knew that she wouldn't feel it. Love numbed you from feeling anything.

She slumped on my body, almost as if _she_ were dead, and stared at my face. Her face was a melting pot of emotions – the look a lover gives after she donates her virginity to you, the look a lover gives after you've betrayed her, the look a lover gives when you've died, the look anybody gives when she wants to believe that everything was merely a dream, an _Inception_ idiocy and something that isn't truly real. Something that was ethereal and was meant to teach you a lesson, something that required you to acquire something before you were allowed to exit.

Jewel and I have learnt so much about the illogical concepts of love, the cruelty of life and the real world, the war between love and hate, life and death. And yet, everything is real, not merely a fantasy but how the state of world actually and should be. Or rather, if eliminated the choices that were not compatible with life and completely illogical, leaving behind logic- that was, life always ended in death, and love never lasts forever. The only thing that does is the real world.

"Blu…" she croaked, so softly it took me several units of concentration to catch her voice, laced with despair and tainting her beautiful, angelic voice. It was ironic that I would be the angel, I figured, since she was the divinely ravishing one among the both of us. I guess that's why she lived – angels were real, not just ethereal or some dream, and should exist in the world rather than the hopeless, jerk-ass romanticist.

There were so many things I wanted to say to her. I wanted to tell her that I was in a better place and that I was with her ethereally even though she couldn't see me. I wanted to tell her that she should not worry about me and continue living as if I didn't exist, do as she wanted to do…only to realise that she didn't want this. She wanted me. She wanted to feel my gaze on her feathers, to taste my breath against her, to cry on my shoulder to let the grief overflow her. I wanted to tell her that I loved her and I wanted all these things as well. I wanted her to feel my kiss and feel me embrace her.

But then, she lifted her head up, and her eyes wandered away from my carcass. She stared at the horizon once more, as the sun had finally revealed itself, a full 1,519,651,984,000 km^2 of light that illuminating the face of the earth, Rio crawling at the edges as morning arrived. Sometimes I wondered what it would be like if the sun disappeared – no light, no hope, no warmth, and no life. Is that what death was like, when the sun's warmth was never felt and light was completely absent, and trapped in an abyss forever?

Jewel took one step towards the coastline. It was subtle at first, but then she took another. And another, and another, until I heard the jangle of metal as she now trudged along the bed of sand to peer into the reflection of herself in the water surface. I followed her, and there I saw her miserable, tear-dried face, in full crystal-clear view for public display. It cut me to the bone that she was hurting… love made you do that. And what really crushed me was that I had caused this.

I don't know what Jewel was thinking. She certainly did not see my reflection, but the way she pondered over her reflection was like she was wondering what she saw in herself. She must have seen a hollow shell of her former self, no longer free but a mere material object left on the road for some heartless person to step on. She must have wondered what life looked like without me – and that, despite the sun gleefully throwing light like free white flowers all over the place, life was completely bleak. She could see write through it, and to be honest, it was only a sheet of silicon dioxide. It was a compound hard to melt, hard to break, hard to even know where the hell it came from, but that was what it was- and it was fact everybody had to accept.

Jewel plunged her head into the water, to refresh herself and blow the air out of her, the sorrow that had been stuck in her windpipe and the emotions she had been bottling. She wanted to wake up from this haunting nightmare, where she would lift her head from the surface and realise that everything was only dream.

There were only two problems with that theory: one, everything wasn't a dream. Spiritual and ethereal, yes, but completely real all the same, the wary net of fantasy broken by the burden of the real world. Two, Jewel's head never emerged from the surface.

Not even after a minute.

And that was what it took me before it dawned on me that she was going to drown herself.

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><p><em>So… erm… review arrow, anybody? No one? Ah heck.<em>

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	2. Laws of Love

_**Please read this warning:**__ I do not own Rio, Jewel, or any character or theme used in the Rio film. They belong solely to Blue Sky Films and 20__th__ Century Fox._

_Alright guys, thanks for being patient. I present to you, the ending of Paradise, and effectively the ULTIMATE ending of Love? I guess I won't do anymore sequels, but if I do, please forgive me. I didn't originally plan to write this, either, but eh. What the heck._

_There is going to be a gap in NtY's update, though. I must apologise, because there is still a lot of plot buffer before the exciting part comes, so you must bear with me. I seriously have no motivation to carry on, but I WILL finish it. If I don't, I might as well open the gate of flaming [which, by the way, is STILL CLOSED!]_

**To all my reviewers: I'm actually really tired of doing multiple review replies, so let us condense these things more often. Once again, thank you all for your wonderful criticisms and I think this and its prequel has been one of the most fun things I've had ever written. I don't know whether you all found this depressing, interesting or even comedic (SmartA55…) but I'm glad you all liked it. So thanks for waiting, and prepare for more captivations from this chapter… hopefully I can meet all of your expectations T_T**

_Anyway, let's get to business, shall we ladies and gentlemen?_

_P.S. Still no Rio DVD; 'nuff said, fellas._

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><p>Can you imagine this situation- in your hands lay a life that you would do anything to save, through any means and by hook or crook would you preserve this life, preventing it from slipping into the gallows of death. Death is supposed to be Heaven or Hell, and anything of those legends that Christians evangelise, and they want humans to choose to accept the existence of Jesus and God – a one-way trip to eternal paradise in Heaven- or not – and you are thrown into Hell. No matter how nice you were, no matter what good deeds you have done, no matter what lengths you would have gone to protect the life of the one you truly loved, so long as you didn't believe in something intangible and invisible, you would be sent to eternal torture. Magnificent, isn't it.<p>

For birds, though, they don't go to Hell. That's because birds don't have the capacity to sin or do anything wrong in God's eyes because they are controlled by humans. I'm pretty sure Tulio would be sent to hell for forcing me to mate with a bird I wasn't married to. I didn't even love him… back then, that was. We can't go Heaven, either, because we also don't have the capacity to go to Church or do any religious rituals- it would seem rather idiotic if humans caught us poring over a Bible.

But then, where the hell do we go, anyway?

I look at my love and I see his eyes would never emerge from the veils of his eyelids, and that he would be incapable to attempting to reciprocate his love for me. The ironic thing is that by being completely shut off by his mission, he had accomplished it. The pain of loss searing through my veins now made my heart melt whenever I thought of him, simply because he had saved my life countless times, giving up his freedom, his interests, and ultimately his life. The way he was so devoted to me and protected me… I loved him for that. He was the only one who made me safe, with a shoulder to cry on that extended to a wing without a knife to stab backs, words that soothed me when I was down and laced with jubilation when I was elated. And who wouldn't want such an individual to commit themselves to the entity that is you.

And yet.

What if you're separated from him? What if he could no longer hear the words "I love you" whispered in his ear by the one he loved, and he could no longer feel your embrace or kiss anymore? What if everything that he's done for you –to whatever length and extent possible to bird- had gone to waste? What if he couldn't even know that what his mission had been accomplished… in a Pyrrhic victory, where by gaining your love, an un-crossable chasm now divided the two of you?

What if all the above was your fault?

I wanted to apologise to Blu, that it wasn't his fault but mine, that I loved him and that he was mine, as I was his. I wanted to cross that chasm, through any means, even, to gain the comfort and security of being with Blu, the veil of protection and love that he provided. I wanted to see him and feel him and taste him and let all my senses be dethroned by the one I loved…

I wanted to join him.

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><p>"Jewel!" I cried frantically, shaking her body with more force than intended, but it does not budge an inch. The problem with being in Paradise was that you could feel everything in the real world, seeing and feeling everything in your surroundings, but not truly able to influence anything that goes on. It was if you never existed.<p>

I figured this was the only way that Jewel could die- she was out of breath, completely exhausted, where she couldn't clamber to the top of Christo Redeemo to jump to her death. No, she had to silently suffocate herself with a vast sheet of saltwater that the beach provided, where nobody but me could see her, where nobody would find her until later, where it would have been too late to save either of us.

She didn't deserve that.

"Jewel, get up! GET UP!" I knew that if I was alive right now and she could hear me or at least be aware of my intention to counter hers, she would immediately retract her head in obedience. But the fact was, she couldn't feel my hurt, she was completely oblivious to the fact that I wanted her to live on in this world, and that she should be free to pursue her own happiness rather than be so grief-stricken by my death as to join me here. Here everything is disconnected from the real world, semi-permeable, you could sense everything around you but you could never influence it. You couldn't influence your love from killing herself.

It was as if Paradise had allied with this cruel reality into making the innocent suffer.

"Jewel, please! Get up! Don't do this, Jewel, get up!" I nearly shrieked, while I placed my wings on her and attempted to generate small motions with them, but her body still wouldn't move. The cycle kept repeating itself, and nothing happened. I kept wondering what Jewel would have felt when she realised that I was gone eternally, and when I espied her reaction, there were so many adjectives I could input – despair, grief, indignation, heartbreak, frustration… everything that I had brought about on her. It now boomeranged to strike me in the face, plastering itself like a leech. The fact that your love was going to die and that you had no way to stop it… that was true despair, that you were completely helpless and you couldn't do anything about it. I deserved it all, I figured.

"Don't do this to me Jewel… please… I love… you…" I whimpered, before the sadness in me burst open the floodgates of my heart, and I truly broke down in sobbing. My heart was just too weak to fight the immense sorrow, though, and it completely destroyed me. How could anybody withstand such a tremendous loss, as if your soul was torn apart by intangible and invisible knives and chainsaws, but could still cut you like a cake? It was beyond me… to lose somebody that you loved, even if you were already lost- you wanted your loved one to live on, after all. Can you imagine- you had fallen victim to the cruelty and harshness of life in order to preserve another life and ensure that she could survive and enjoy her residence in the real world… only to have her die for you.

Dying for somebody was, I figured, supposed to be heroic and for the good of the one you loved, a worthy sacrifice. But when you die for somebody not for your intentions but because of the circumstances of the situation, is it heroic? Jewel is going to die because she would not be able to stand the grief of my death- how is this heroic? Wasn't it villainous, rather, that I had brought this upon her?

"JEWEL!" I hollered for one last time, banging on her body with no success in generating any response. What was the use of screaming at the top of your lungs, anyway, in this lonely place where nobody else could hear you?

It must have been midnight where I last found myself still an entity of the real world… now the sky was a brilliant white, light spilling into every inch of the sky and indicating purity in a world where terrorism exists, governments are tainted with any degree of corruption, and where love cannot exist at all before being tainted. It often makes me wonder why some evil people cannot be tracked down, whereas good people can be executed for one small mistake, why loving mothers-to-be have defected babies whereas crack addicts are blessed with healthy children, why true love is always either forbidden or ended cruelly by whatever comes their way.

Jewel was dead. I know that nobody can survive 15 minutes of being underwater. Can you imagine? It must have been at least 8 hours – 1 part of 3 of a full day gone – and nobody has noticed us. If only God has sent a random stranger to wander past us and at least have saved Jewel… but here we were, 2 carcasses on the seashore where a nearby hobo would probably see and eat us. It is only a worse-case scenario, but then again, the whole world functions this way.

Have you wondered what the force of sadness is? It was one thing to have 20 N striking you on the head to death, but if you compare that intensity to the way sorrow smashed your heart into pieces… it was almost immeasurable- infinite, just like life in the ethereal world.

But what is the force of happiness then? It was like healing, I figured, as it countered the anguish of sorrow. The law of momentum states that two opposing forces must equal to zero once they are added together should the body be in equilibrium. If sorrow hit you with a force of infinity, then the force of happiness would then hit you with a force of negative infinity, right? It shouldn't be able to exist, then, since forces are always positive and always do work.

It was as if happiness wouldn't do any work whatsoever, so long as sorrow was kept into play.

I don't honestly know what made me give up on attempting saving her life, but really, what else could I have done? I was physically separated from her… anything that I did would not be seen, heard or felt by her. It was like a slippery slope, a chain reaction that nothing could hamper, nothing could extinguish the spark that trailed closer and closer to the dynamite before exploding. It might have been exhilarating, completely awe-striking to see an explosion, but then it dissipates completely like a candle in the night. What could I have done? What could Jewel have done?

She only wanted to join me in this world of Paradise.

And that's when my mind flicked a switch to let the darkness be filled up with whatever temporal flash of light I could generate. She was here now. She had passed from life to death, a transition from a tangible world to one that wasn't. There was no response from Jewel's body now… but she had acquired a new one here. Like me.

I tried to recover from my sobbing fit (call it melodramatic, but it is justified) and touched Jewel. It was a mere tap, but I could sense something else, as if she had transformed into something else, a nymph into an adult, part of a life cycle so obscure and insignificant it could be completely disregarded. With no hesitation, I flipped her body over – her carcass made no response, but then her spirit obeyed my wing motions and disconnected itself from the earthly body, revealing a sleeping Jewel that now belonged in the surreal, intangible world of Paradise…she was now here with me.

Her body didn't look any different from her earthly one –although I am the worst gauge available for this; she looked beautiful to me still- but I could _feel_ it being different. Here tactility was tinted slightly as now she felt more… real, as if she were definitely part of this world. When I touched her body while she was alive, it was as if we were detached, disconnected by some communication barrier. But now she truly felt like some object of Paradise, transited from the real world to here.

And it was almost as if she hadn't changed one bit.

"Jewel!" I croaked once more, my throat now hoarse from the initial barrage of words fired from my beak when she had died, and I shook her ethereal body, my wings exhausted and sore. Whoever said that pain and suffering was absent into the spiritual worlds must be a blatant liar, especially to the heart, an infinite force enacting on your body. But somehow, some miniscule force was preventing me from breaking; something that could have destroyed was averted by a tiny ray of hope that had been ignited when I saw Jewel's new body…

And something that morphed in a surface area of illumination when Jewel opened her eyes.

I didn't really know how to react. The emotional capacity of the heart is, after all, restricted- it was a strange mixture of the scar of grief and guilt, along with the wave of relief and the halo of elation, rushing joy. How would you feel if the one you loved was alive and well… as well as dead and gone forever? Was it even physically possible for happiness to coexist with sorrow? Was it possible for life and death to coexist without cancelling out each other?

A positive number is always bigger than a negative one, right?

Everything seemed to move in slow-motion: coming to terms with Jewel's death was one thing, but to see her alive again… it was something else. There was a music command that I learnt while rummaging through a music book- _fp_, which meant the dynamics were _f _–loud- which was immediately followed by _p_-soft. It was as if you were shocked out of your wits –one small erratic motion, one brief increase in dynamics- before everything returned back to normal. But of course, it couldn't.

For Jewel, I figured, meeting me was accompanied with the sheer, pure emotion of jubilation. To see me alive would have lifted her spirits up from her initial crushing sadness that had overcome her… her reaction was expected to be happy, that she could finally meet me alive again. But the fact is, I had sacrificed my life to preserve hers- now that she has permanently disconnected herself from the real world, how was I supposed to react? Was I supposed to be elated that my mission had ultimately failed despite all valiant effort?

"Blu," Jewel muttered, a smile –the very same one that had melted my heart on the tram- spreading across her face, as if futilely attempting to lighten the situation but had a reversed effect. It was all so melodramatic, as if it came out from a crappy soap opera or a seriously tragic Shakespearean play. I always attempted to imagine what happened when Romeo and Juliet met in Hell (they had killed each other, hadn't they?), realising the folly of their own deaths and how it shouldn't have meant to be. They had only each other to blame, after all, since they were stupid enough to believe appearance rather than reality, to kill themselves, to fall in love, to attempt to make their relationship work despite the circumstances.

Forbidden love, they realised, never prevails.

"Blu, I'm so happy to see you…" Jewel's voice was hoarse, as if she had grown a century older, as she sat up with considerable energy to embrace me in her wings, while I remained frozen in position. I have never been an eloquent bird –I couldn't even reciprocate something as 'simple' as love- so what was I supposed to say? 'Jewel, I'm happy that you're here with me, now that you're dead?' Was it even ethereally beneficial for one to be dead? You see in funerals that people mourn over dead people –I have had a 20 minute experience of that once, still vivid and etched in my mind- so shouldn't I be doing just that?

My ears are still filled with tears when she looked me in the eyes, a blurred, intangible figure. I could barely make out a confused expression on her face. "What's wrong, Blu?" she asked, like an innocent child asking his widowed father. "Aren't you happy to see me?"

The answer would have been yes and no… but these weren't the words that spilled out of my mouth. "Why?" I asked, before I could retract my words, before I could prevent the past from happening and before I could press the reset button.

"Why what?"

"Why… why did you do that?" Disbelief had leaked in my tone, tainting the halo of joy illuminating Jewel. "Why did you… kill yourself?"

My vision was starting to clarify. "I thought you wanted me to be with you," Jewel stated rather calmly, matter-of-fact. "I thought… you had my interests at heart."

"That's the thing," I muttered, ducking my head. "I thought you wanted to be alive. I thought you wanted to be free and roam this world and-"

"Freedom?" Jewel asked scepticism laced into her tone. "You wanted me to have freedom? But Blu I already have you."

"But I wanted you to live." And suddenly I made the same mistake of blurting out the not-meant-to again- the words emerged harsher than it should have. I could see her face, stung by it, and I wanted to say sorry, that I didn't mean what I said, that every action I made was flawed and filled with contradiction. But you don't have the privilege of stopping the sands of time or rewinding like in TiVo. You have to move on.

"I wanted you to live… and live your life as to how you wanted it to. Do you know why I pushed you out of that cage, Jewel?" -my voice was now in an unstoppable crescendo- "I wanted you to be safe and sound. I wanted to bear the brunt for you and… and… and I did it because I love you." I sniffled, attempting to keep my emotions under control. Then again, emotions were like particles, packed together to form the solid of your heart- when it melted under the heat of love, however, it morphed into something different, and would lose all regularity of arrangement and move erratically, liquid.

Jewel remained silent. I possessed no glance of her expression – I didn't even desire for it- because I knew what she was like. I could picture it. "I wanted you to just carry on with life… and live your dreams out… I wanted you to protect you from any danger and… and I wanted you to be… happy…"

I knew the words that flew out of Jewel's beak before it did. "I wasn't happy, Blu," Jewel said, her voice now torn by sadness. "Not when the only reason to be alive was gone."

She looked me into my eyes. I had expecting her to be enraged, that I should suggest that she would have benefitted from residing in the real world for any more time, that she could ride out the scars that my death had permanently left. But instead she continued to smile at me, as bright and cheery as the sun. "I love you, Blu," she half-whispered, a romanticist look on her face. "I want to be with you wherever you are, and wherever you go through. I can't survive without you, and I… I will never be happy if I continue to live…"

I couldn't respond to that. It had evaded me for a while –which had invariably led to the emotions leaking into my heart- that if Jewel truly loved me… then she would obviously be nowhere close to joyous. It was simple logic – if I was dead, then Jewel would be heart-broken. If Jewel had no reason to exist anymore, then she would not. If _p_, then _q_.

Jewel dropped her face, crestfallen. "I know you wanted to save me, Blu, and I know you only wanted to protect me… but… but you died." –on the mention of death, tears sprung to her eyes; how many tears have to be shed on the obscure deaths of two birds?- "I… I felt as if something had been ripped out of me, Blu. I felt completely empty… without you…"

As she lurched forward to whimper softly into my chest, my mind slowly began to wrap around this. Again, the effects of love worked my logic, a simple sequence of chain events. The very emotion of love and its causes, however, still mystify me. How is it that in one day, Jewel suddenly manages to love me? How is it that such a complete transformation had occurred from perceiving me as a burden, to having her heart depend on my existence? How is it that she could even possibly love me in the first place… it was all the same questions I could apply to myself, queries that pounded my head because my mind works by logic. Love, on the other hand, works by emotion, and the answers to all these evade me thus.

"Jewel," I said in a hush. Her eyes linked with mine, glimmering in the light of the sun. The real world could affect Paradise, but not vice versa. The laws of love still functioned in this new realm.

"Jewel, why do you love me?" I blurted out, this time with no regrets.

Her smile re-emerged, and suddenly the unexplainable, illogical elation filled me again, the spirit to move forward rather than mourn over the past. To see the one you loved satisfied and joyous… it gave you the sense of completion. I guess that was why nobody died smiling, but in this place, it was difficult not to, especially in the wings of your love. "Is there a logical reason to love another?" she asked, even with a hint of light-heartedness in her tone. Why should she be serious, anyway, in an ethereal world where anything was possible? "I love you because you've been with me, and comforted me when I needed it… and protected me at every cost, and… I want to be with you."

She laid her head on my chest, such that I was in a sitting position with my wings wrapped around her body, and she lay on me. Her eyes wandered to the golden sunrise that greeted us. "I don't care about the world… or even my own life anymore, Blu." She spoke with no hint of regret, no suggestion that she wanted so badly to retract everything that she did and said. And why should she? "Love like a magnet, a connection between two people. And I don't know how or why and I don't really care" –she turned her head to me now- "but I love you. And that's all I need to know."

She leaned forward and pressed her beak to mine, this time in the full knowledge that she was kissing me, an existing entity that was truly in her presence. I should have expected it- my frown had dissipated and instead started to mirror hers, which was a clear entrance- but I was still nevertheless thrown aback. Discounting the other one a few minutes ago, this was our first… and intangible fireworks and hot emotion pulsed through me…

I pulled away after a quite a while – accuracy is absent as my body clock is never functional. "I love you, too, Jewel." I said, again no regret or desire to retract the past. The present was the only thing on my mind, and that was I have Jewel. I didn't need anything else to calm me down- love could suffice, more than enough. Love… it is an emotion, where even where all else fails and circumstances get in your way, as long as your heart lived on and you had your lover with you, love prevails.

And suddenly I loved this new place called Paradise. It was like a safety net – one that was indestructible and with a permanent residence. The physical world was only temporal, where people came and went, a journey that people fussed about all the time. The destination, I realised, was an eternal, ethereal place where anything was possible. I guess Christianity had been right about life being completely obscure to this place that you resided in forever… a paradisiacal, pleasurable new realm, completely disconnected from the yoke of reality.

And disconnected from all logic, from all foundations that love lay on – it could, after all, fly freely in the air, burden-less.

I don't really know how long we lay there, her in my wings as we stared at the horizon, and flickeringly at each other. A new dawn had begun, a new beginning and with hope that shone above all. We just sat there, swooning over one another, kissing at any apt or inapt point of time, without a care in the world, only the emotion of love and elation levitating in the atmosphere.

We were together now. It took a while for my mind to wrap around this fact, but when it did, contentment lay gently on my weary soul. Nothing else mattered anymore- not that we were dead, not that we had been grieved by death and the loss of life and love, but that Jewel was in love with me, as I was with her. And all you really needed to move forward… was love, being next to the one you loved and protecting and providing joy to her.

At one point I took a glance of our bodies. The tide had swept Jewel's body on top of mine; we were united even in death, always chained-together birds. And that wasn't a bad thing- it wasn't as if Jewel was a burden of any sort.

I knew that some people would be sad. Linda would grieve to no end and Rafael would have his heart smashed by this. But I hoped that they would look at our bodies, next to each other, and be happy that we were unified in death, and it didn't matter if we were permanently disconnected from the real world. Because, in the most beautiful sacrifice I could have ever conceived, it meant that we were permanently connected in this new world, in the ethereal Paradise that would always see us through.

Jewel and I would be together forever, be it now or later, be it here or in the real world- because love managed to prevail on despite the circumstances.

Who needed the laws of love anyway?

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><p>"Love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away. For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when completeness comes, what is in part disappears." <strong>~1 Corinthians 13:8-9<strong>

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><p>~THE <span>PROPER<span> END~

Yeah... actually, Paradise was really just some extra stuff after Love?- it was never really significant. I know I initially wanted to make the ending ambiguous, but it was really just to appease the people who hated the ending of Love? I liked both endings (though I won't write anymore; please don't ask for any), really, but I think I put some people off. I don't think Paradise was one of my greatest works ever, but it was just to get the gool ol' writing gears going again after 5 weeks of intense revision. X|

Also, I must confess something. If you guys noticed any similarity between this and WolfOnFyre's story 'Exit Wounds', well, it is pretty similar in plot. I kind of drew a bit of inspiration from that marvellous story to give a 'what if' situation. If you guys don't like this ending, feel free to disregard it. I don't know what you guys really feel; I can imagine it to be mixed, confused even. X|

I think I might have failed. Did you guys also notice the distinct lack of dialogue in this whole story? The interaction was rather meagre, too, and my friends, I am not proud of this. T_T I am planning to rewrite this and its prequel as well, but when I have the time. Sigh…

Reviews are also welcomed- no, they're WANTED. I really need to know how I did. Stupid exams made my writing skills horrid. D=

So, let's end off with the royal traditional review arrow:

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